After Tehran (13 page)

Remorse
? For what? For being tortured and raped?

All the muscles in my body tightened. She had known my story when she had first approached me. My eyes filled with tears, but I held them back. I tried to say something, but words were swirling in my head.

“I see …” I managed to mumble.

“I have to insist that you do not mention in interviews that you have worked with me,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because some people say that I helped you write your book …”

“This is ridiculous! Why would anyone say that?”

“Well, some people think I helped you.”

“I helped
you
with your work—you didn’t help me with mine.”

“I just called to let you know this, okay?” She hung up.

I stood there in my kitchen, struggling to understand what had just happened. But I couldn’t get my mind around it. I had considered her a friend.

A few weeks later, I read a letter she had put on a website she had created. In it, she explained that she had come to know me after I was interviewed by CBC Radio and TV and a story about me was published in the
Toronto Star
. She also mentioned that after seeing and hearing the interviews, she had hired another Iranian-Canadian ex-prisoner and me for six months. This was exactly what had happened. I read on.

“During this process,” she wrote,
^*
“I became more familiar with Marina Nemat’s political views, and it was obvious to me that her story of the prison was different from other published memoirs. In her interview with the
Toronto Star
(January 30, 2005), she had mentioned her ‘marriage’ with her interrogator and was not hiding it, and she had said that she would publish her memoir. To understand the difference between Marina’s experience in the prison and the ones of other women political prisoners, from the beginning [of the project] to the time that her book was published, I asked a few women political prisoners about her, but no one knew anything, and no one accused her of being a
tavvab …
”

Then she noted that after the publication of
Prisoner of Tehran
, a few ex–political prisoners said that I was a traitor. She added, “According to the criticisms [of a few ex–political prisoners] of
Prisoner of Tehran
, today, I have no doubt that Marina Nemat is a
tavvab …”

I stared at my computer screen, unable to read any further. In Evin when interrogating me, Hamehd had called me a “dirty infidel.” He had told me that I deserved to die, that the world had forgotten about me, and that my execution would make it a better place. Now individuals who claimed to believe in freedom and democracy called me names and condemned me. But I would not become disheartened. I knew Shahnoosh was watching over me.

^*
Translated from the Persian.

Shaadi’s Card

M
y story was now in book form, yet a terrible urge impelled me to tell it again and again. A friend warned me that survivor’s guilt was driving me and it would eventually take over my life: I was running like a marathon runner with no finish line in sight, and in the end, I would die of exhaustion. Maybe she was right, but I was supposed to have died at sixteen; now I was overdue.

My publishers sent me around the world, and at almost every book signing, a few Iranians would ask me to sign my book for them in Persian. Some were ex–political prisoners themselves, and some had had a loved one imprisoned in Iran. After one event, a young Iranian woman broke into tears, telling me her mother had been a prisoner in Evin but had never talked about it. Another woman recounted that her brother had been severely tortured in Evin but had survived. He, too, was mostly silent about the experience. Amid the hugs and tears, I was always on the lookout for a familiar face, hoping to find my prison friends in the crowd, but this didn’t happen. It took a while for my friends from Iran to contact me, and the first contact came in an unexpected way after Voice of America’s Persian News Network did a TV interview with me in Persian in Los Angeles, California. It was broadcast
worldwide, and phone calls and emails were accepted during the show. The kindness and support of Iranians from around the globe overwhelmed me. There were even messages from Iran sent by those who had satellite dishes and been able to watch it.

A few months after the interview, I received a large envelope from my publisher in the United States. I shook it over a table in my living room, and a small white envelope fell out. I looked at the sender’s name and froze: Shaadi Golzari. I read the name again and again, my heart beating faster. I ripped open the envelope to find a card from one of my best friends from elementary and high school in Tehran. She had never been arrested, but she had watched her friends disappear one by one. Now she lived in Los Angeles.

After Evin, I didn’t try to contact any of my classmates for many years, and I saw only one of the girls who had been in prison with me: Shahnaz. Her release had come a few months before mine. We had not known each other prior to Evin, but I had given her my phone number. She called me one day in Tehran and then stopped by for a brief visit. She had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Evin, and I had been very worried about her. I was amazed at how “normal” we both now looked. We chatted in my bedroom, its large windows looking out on a backyard that overflowed with roses of every colour. While I was in prison, my parents had moved in with a friend who had a large house, and my new bedroom was overwhelmingly pink. We sat in pink armchairs and sipped Earl Grey tea from gold-rimmed china teacups with pink roses on them. Shahnaz must have come directly from the salon. Every strand of her long straight black hair was perfectly in place. She was elegantly dressed in a tight black skirt and a blue silk blouse. Like me, she wore high heels, and I wondered if, after all the lashings she had endured, her shoes hurt her feet as much as my shoes did mine. We didn’t talk about Evin. She had a perpetual smile on her face that concealed the fear and worry I had always
seen in her large, sad brown eyes. We each said “those days” maybe once or twice with a smile and a shrug. We were not ready to talk about the horrors we had witnessed. Our experience lived in us, and we were both aware of it, but we had decided to ignore it. However, her presence in my house spoke louder than any words ever could. She had come despite the fact that every second she spent with me transported her back to the trauma she wanted to forget. She had come to show me that what we shared and the friendship that had carried us through so much pain would remain a part of her, even though neither she nor I could find the courage to express our feelings. Before leaving, she hugged me, and I felt the same tremble in her body that I had felt as we embraced each other in Evin, listening to gunshots. She put on her black
chador
just before she walked onto the street through my front door. I never saw her again.

After Shahnaz’s visit, I went to the home of only one prison friend. She was still in Evin at the time. Before my release, she had asked me to tell her parents something she had been unable to tell them herself: that she had been sentenced to twenty years.

I don’t have a clear memory of the hour I spent with her family. I just remember looking down all the time. I wanted to tell her parents the truth, but I didn’t have the strength. How could I gaze into their eyes and say that their daughter would remain in prison for such a long time when I had been released? Except, I had made a promise to her, so I told her brother-in-law as he drove me home. Devastated, he nodded and said he would break the news to the family.

Now a voice from the past was calling to me. Shaadi had written her telephone number on the card she had sent me. I phoned her immediately. The phone rang three times—an eternity—before she answered.

“Shaadi?” I mumbled. “It’s me, Marina.”

“Oh, my God! Wait … I might kill someone … God … I’m driving … on the highway … I’m pulling … over … hang on … is this really you, Marina?”

“It’s me … How are you?”

“I thought you’d never call! I thought you didn’t want to speak to me.”

“What are you talking about? Why wouldn’t I want to speak to you? I just got your card. I phoned immediately.”

She told me she had sent the card to my publisher a few months earlier. It had taken my publisher a while to send readers’ letters to me.

She said she had read my book and was thrilled to find bits and pieces of herself in it. She remembered my room, my books, my balcony, the pencil case I sold Sarah, and my father’s blue Oldsmobile. To talk to someone I shared so many memories with was comforting. She was in touch with a few of our friends who had been in prison. Most of them still lived in Iran; after their release, they had managed to continue their studies, and then they had gotten married. I was relieved to hear they had survived. Shaadi had visited with some of them on a recent trip back to Iran. Not surprisingly, they hadn’t wanted to talk about Evin.

Shaadi’s mother, who lived in Iran, had told her about my book when she had seen me on Voice of America’s Persian News Network. She immediately phoned her daughter in L.A.

“Marina is on TV!” her mother said to her excitedly.

“Marina? Which Marina?”

“How many Marinas do you know?”

“But
Madar joon
, I’m in the States and you’re in Iran!”

“The broadcast is live. On satellite. It’s happening at the Borders bookstore close to your house.”

Shaadi ran to the store, only to find that the interview had not been live after all but had taken place a few days earlier. One of
the employees who noticed her distress told her to write to my publisher.

Shaadi told me that she soon had to attend a family function in New York City—an hour’s plane ride from me in Toronto. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see my long-lost friend, so I bought an airline ticket to New York.

On the plane, I went through my memories of Shaadi. In a way, it felt as though I’d known her in another lifetime, but somehow, it also felt like only the other day that we had sat on her bed, our knees crossed and our heads bent toward each other, as we’d talked about boys and gossiped about friends. She had always been carefree, and her joyful laughter bubbled up from deep inside her. She seemed to walk on a cloud. Before the revolution, we’d had no secrets between us. We’d played silly little games as young girls do and lived in a world half real and half make-believe where every wonderful thing could happen.

When the revolution came and things grew more complicated by the day, I slowly withdrew from her and all my friends. What was left of that joyful young girl? Was I at all the Marina she remembered?

We had decided to meet at the entrance of my publisher’s building on Avenue of the Americas in New York. People flowed around me like an enormous school of fish. They appeared full of purpose and determination. I wondered if any of them could imagine how it felt to find a friend after so many years and so much pain. I wanted to stop them and tell them about the friends I had lost and the one I had finally found.

I recognized Shaadi as soon as she turned the corner. She was wearing a red top and a black skirt. At first glance, she looked almost exactly as I remembered her. Even her hairstyle was more or less the same, her long hair falling on her shoulders. As I held her in my arms, tears gathered in my eyes, the world moved backward in time—and I was home.

We took the subway to the apartment of the relative she was staying with, and we were so busy talking we missed our stop. She told me that after many of her friends, including me, were arrested in the early eighties, she became terribly depressed. Nevertheless, she finished high school and entered university to train as a nurse. After getting a degree, she worked in Iran for a while, but the conditions were so difficult that she at last decided she couldn’t bear the pressure any longer. She was tired of always worrying about the Revolutionary Guard arresting her because a few strands of her hair were showing or because she might have said something “wrong.” She found a job in a hospital in Dubai. The pay was relatively good, and in the beginning, she was happy. Her new home, with its amazing skyscrapers and architectural wonders, truly impressed her. Many Iranians had gone to Dubai for work, so she didn’t feel too out of place. She was happy that even though local women had to wear the
hejab
, foreign women didn’t have to cover their hair.

Shaadi worked in the emergency department of the hospital, and she noticed that most nights, at least one badly beaten foreign woman was brought in. The vast majority of these women were from Pakistan, India, and the Philippines, and served as nannies or maids. At the outset, she didn’t make much of the beaten foreign women, because she thought that the attacks were isolated incidents. But one night she had to attend to a woman who had been so badly beaten her skull had cracked. When Shaadi asked the head nurse if the woman’s injuries had been reported to the police, she was told that because the woman worked for a well-known and powerful local family, no report would be sent in. Shaadi was shocked and disgusted. Life in Dubai became unbearable for her when she realized that the authorities did nothing to help the women who had moved there in search of a better life. She went to the U.S. Embassy and applied for a visa.